1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a semiconductor device, a method of fabricating the same, a circuit board, and an electronic apparatus.
2. Description of the Related Art
In the microminiaturization of semiconductor devices, a bare chip mounting arrangement is regarded as an ideal form of assembly. However, since quality assurance and the handling of a bare chip are difficult, the chip is assembled in a package during semiconductor device fabrication. As one of the package forms meeting the need for high pin counts, a ball grid array (BGA) type package has been developed recently. On a substrate of the BGA type package, external terminal bumps are arranged in an area array to permit surface mounting.
As one kind of BGA type package, there is a tape ball grid array (T-BGA) package in which a film carrier tape is used as a base in fabrication with a tape automated bonding (TAB) technique. In T-BGA packaging using the TAB technique, semiconductor chips can be assembled continuously.
Since the film carrier tape is liable to warp due to lack of rigidity, however, it is required to attach a reinforcing sheet (stiffener). In a process of semiconductor device fabrication, the stiffener is attached to an individual film package punched out after each semiconductor chip is mounted on the film carrier tape. More particularly, the film carrier tape is punched out into separate film packages, and then the stiffener is individually attached.
In this method, after the stiffener has been attached as mentioned above, the film packages must be handled individually in subsequent processes such as bump formation, resulting in trouble in fabrication.
It is therefore an objective of the present invention to obviate the above-mentioned drawback by providing a semiconductor device, a method of fabricating the same, a circuit board, and an electronic apparatus, which allow easy handling.